No mousy wreck … Emily Blunt in The Girl on the Train.
Photograph: Allstar/DreamWorks SKG

‘The 8.04 slow train from Ashbury to Euston,” says the narrator in The Girl on the Train as the service trundles to a stop, “can test the patience of the most seasoned commuter. The journey is supposed to take 54 minutes, but it rarely does: this section of the track is ancient, decrepit, beset with signal problems and never-ending engineering works.”

It’s details like this – and the carriage full of sighing passengers – that made Paula Hawkins’ bestseller so appealing: the evocation of an all too familiar world of British disappointment and frustration. In this glum milieu, divorced alcoholic Rachel Watson gets a bottle of chenin blanc from a Whistlestop to take the edge off her return journey – and the bundle of rags she glimpses from the window takes on an aura of sinister abjection and threat (actually, a not unfamiliar feeling to anyone who’s ever rolled on tracks that fall under Network Rail’s cheerless ambit).

The new film adaptation – although dark and stylish – loses the thing I savoured most: a very British sense of grime and hobbled ambition. Swapping the home counties for upstate New York, the film follows Emily Blunt as she is whisked from NYC’s ritzier burbs on a service that never trundles, still less stops for long unexplained minutes. Can you glimpse any ritzy burbs from a Euston commute? I’ve never noticed any, but answers on a postcard please.

And Blunt is hardly the mousy wreck I imagined the novel’s demented protagonist to be. Yes, she brings psychological heft to the role, but she’s insufficiently raddled and defeated, to my mind anyway. Fortunately, her character is English, which helps her to seem satisfyingly alien and bonkers in a world of blah New Yorkers. But this is little more than a figleaf over an otherwise ill-advised American retread.

Who's going to complain about their book being performed by Hugh Grant as a semi-nude face-painting warrior?

I understand why novelists feel this way: it’s not just because they’re pleased as punch to have eminent actors such as Blunt, or John Cusack in High Fidelity, bringing their characters to life, but also because, if they’re real artists, they must trust adapters to be creatively faithless. David Mitchell felt that way when Cloud Atlas was adapted by the Wachowskis: his narrative was intriguingly retooled, but it kind of worked and, hey, who’s going to complain about their book being performed by Tom Hanks or Hugh Grant as some of time-travelling, semi-nude, face-painting warrior?

But the readers may feel betrayed, then disappointed, particularly when a grungy locale gets airbrushed and upscaled. Hornby was wrong: Chicago isn’t Crouch End and Cusack was too damned handsome to properly incarnate the homuncular hero. That’s the frequent complaint: transatlantic crossings wash off the grub and bring up sheen.

Sometimes worse things can happen. Take poor old George Sluizer. In 1988, the film-maker made a superb abduction thriller called The Vanishing that culminates with – spoiler alert! – our drugged hero coming round to find the psychopath has buried him alive. The final shots are from within the grave, with the victim desperately scratching to escape, his lighter flickering ever more hopelessly as the oxygen runs out. A marvellous and unremittingly miserable ending.

Grave misgivings … George Sluizer’s remake of his own thriller The Vanishing. Photograph: Snap/Rex/Shutterstock

Then what happened? Sluizer was invited out to Hollywood to remake his film with Sandra Bullock, Kiefer Sutherland and Jeff Bridges. At the new denouement, Sutherland is rescued by Bullock who has escaped by clocking the evil Bridges over the head with a shovel. Hollywood Ending 1, Artistic Integrity nil.

US remakes can be better, though. There may be those of you who prefer Niels Arden Oplev’s Swedish-language Girl With the Dragon Tattoo to the David Fincher remake. But let me say this: you are out of your tiny minds – as are those of you who prefer the Seattle-set version of TV thriller The Killing to the Copenhagen-set original.

Perhaps, though, we should simply praise more and rank less. So fine is The Magnificent Seven that it’s convenient to forget that John Sturges’s 1960 western is a remake – of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 classic, Seven Samurai. Yes, relocating from Japan to Mexico loses a lot: specifically, a village of farmers menaced by bandits in 1586, during the Warring States period. But we gain so much: not just Elmer Bernstein’s Bartók-inspired score, but something very uncommon in Hollywood cinema – the idea that victory is far from simple, and can even conceal its opposite.

As Yul Brynner rides off past the graves of his fallen comrades, he reflects: “Only the farmers won. We lost. We’ll always lose.” These lines echo those from Seven Samurai – showing that, for all the changes, The Magnificent Seven was true to the source’s spirit. Indeed, Kurosawa liked the film so much that he apparently sent Sturges a sword (of course, he may have thought the film was so bad he wanted Sturges to commit seppuku, but it seems unlikely).

Often, it’s invidious to choose between remake and original: like PM Dawn’s Set Adrift on Memory Bliss and its source, Spandau Ballet’s True, both should exist in the best of all possible worlds. Peter Moffat’s 2008 BBC series Criminal Justice inspired Steven Zaillian and Richard Price’s no less wonderful new TV drama The Night Of, transferring the action from Britain to New York, but retaining much of the storyline. Both Con O’Neill in the original and John Turturro in the retool play lawyers struggling with horrible eczema of the foot – and they’re both wonderful.

In Get Carter Caine chucks a gangster off a brutalist Gateshead car park. These cherishable details aren't in the remake

US remakes are too often regarded as ideas-free, money-grabs on rich European originals – a perspective that suits hubristic types who regard America as populated by culturally rapacious airheads. Few would defend the 2003 remake of The Italian Job, which shifts much of its best car chases from Mediterranean corniches to Los Angeles. But I would, not least because the 1969 original is ridiculously overrated and the remake features not just better action sequences but a performance from Mark Wahlberg – in the Michael Caine role – that no one has properly appreciated. Why there isn’t an Oscar for Musclebound Suffering at the Wheel of a Stupidly Small Car is beyond me.

Is John Simm more convincing as a ruthless hack in conspiracy drama State of Play than Russell Crowe is in its Americanised incarnation? Is the Washington House of Cards better than the Westminster one? Here’s another poser: is Steve Carell better in the US Office than Ricky Gervais is in the original? I’m not sure, but what I regret losing is the opening credits that featured Slough in all its bomb-worthy glory to the sound of the Stereophonics singing Handbags and Gladrags. Americans can’t do dismal quite like the British.

Tyneside to Stateside … Michael Caine in the original Get Carter (1971) and Sylvester Stallone in the 2000 remake. Composite: Franchise Pictures/Metro/Allstar

Which brings us to The Get Carter Question: Tyneside or Stateside? One of the great pleasures, for me, of seeing Michael Caine as the cockney hit man roaming the north east to hunt down his brother’s killer is the bit where he chucks a gangster off a brutalist car park in Gateshead. None of these cherishable local details remain in the 2000 remake starring a risibly moustachioed Sylvester Stallone, who plays a Vegas mob enforcer terminating Seattle hoods who whacked his brother. Caine, god love him, was even inveigled into a cameo, but even his imprimatur can’t rescue a remake that the New York Times called “so minimally plotted that not only does it lack subtext or context, but it also may be the world’s first movie without even a text”.

Naturally, when it comes to remakes, Alfred Hitchcock is in a class of his own. His 1956 film The Man Who Knew Too Much is a retooling of a 1934 film of the same name – by one Alfred Hitchcock. Some lovely details get excised. Gone is the ending in which, for the final shoot-out with the rozzers, the criminals return to their lair – a temple to a sun-worshipping cult in Wapping. Instead of those barmy scenes are new ones that are no less preposterous. Can it be true that Doris Day helps foil an assassination attempt on the Prime Minister in the Royal Albert Hall? And that, in reward, he invites her to sing – leading to a very loud and very wrong rendition of Que Sera Sera?

Finally, it’s worth saying that when Hollywood mangles a masterpiece of European cinema, it sometimes does so with such gusto that the only thing to do is stand up and applaud. I’m thinking of Neil LaBute’s 2006 version of Robin Hardy’s 1973 The Wicker Man, which shifted the action from a Hebridean isle overrun by worshippers of a pagan Celtic deity, to an island off Washington state where descendants of witches who fled the Salem trials have holed up to practise crazed paganism.

While I found Edward Woodward being burned alive at the end of the original everlastingly upsetting, I’m still smiling at the memory of the remake. If there’s a funnier death in cinema, I don’t care to hear about it. Nicolas Cage, allergic to bees, has his head shoved into a cage full of them. “No, not the bees!” he screams, in a performance that makes his histrionics in everything from Wild at Heart to Face/Off seem understated. “Not the bees! Aaaaghhh!”